Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s son quietly landed a political appointee job as a lawyer in the Treasury Department early last year, NOTUS has learned, posing a potential conflict of interest as courts wrestle with challenges to President Donald Trump’s deal to avoid future tax audits and the new massive $1.776 billion fund meant to enrich his allies.
Philip Alito has been working as an attorney with the Treasury’s office of the general counsel, which provides legal and policy advice to Secretary Scott Bessent, according to four former government officials who confirmed he worked there. NOTUS was also able to obtain a functional email address at the department for Alito.
Alito’s employment with the department is something of a closely guarded secret. He doesn’t maintain a public resume or LinkedIn, the Treasury Department website makes no mention of him, and his three professional bar listings are outdated or incorrectly list previous employers.
Alito was hired to the Treasury general counsel’s “front office” in the first months of the second Trump administration as the White House sought to staff loyal political appointees across the federal government, according to one former official with direct knowledge of the arrangement. His exact role was still being sorted during his first few weeks there as senior officials rearranged professional responsibilities, this official added.
“Everybody knew who he was. I think it’s fair to say he kept a pretty low profile. I kind of had the impression that he was kind of a little bit sheepish about his celebrity affiliation. You’d go into a meeting and if people were introducing themselves by first and last name, he’d just say ‘Phil,’ not Phil Alito. He’s a pretty soft-spoken guy,” this person said.
Alito was made an attorney-adviser who would get briefed on all kinds of important Treasury matters and offer legal feedback, according to a second source.
“There’s no doubt he got that position because of who he is,” the second person said. “[Advisers] are in all the meetings, so they knew all the issues across the board.”
The younger Alito was an attorney at the Treasury when a lawsuit against the department and several other agencies was argued before the Supreme Court in November challenging Trump’s use of emergency powers to issue tariffs. The department never disclosed that in court documents. His father, Justice Alito, did not recuse himself from the case — and ultimately joined in a dissent written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The majority ruled in February that Trump didn’t have the authority to issue sweeping tariffs, and the decision set into motion the massive refunds that now beguile the Trump administration.
Potential conflicts of interest abound going forward. There are already federal legal challenges to Trump’s so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that calls on the Treasury Department to provide access to $1.776 billion in public money to reward people who claim to have been targeted unfairly by the Justice Department. The administration is expected to use some of those funds to reward the Jan. 6 insurrectionists Trump pardoned on his first day back in office.
That case could ultimately drag the Treasury Department before the Supreme Court, with a Virginia lawsuit from the advocacy group Democracy Forward saying the fund is “on a collision course with the United States Constitution” and a D.C. lawsuit filed by two former Capitol Police officers calling it “a corrupt sham.”
Lawyers at the general counsel’s office review legal matters pertaining to taxation by the Internal Revenue Service, economic policy and law enforcement cracking down on illicit finance. The Treasury Department did not respond to questions on Wednesday about the job or whether Alito worked on particular legal matters pertaining to cases his father may hear at the Supreme Court. A communications officer for the court did not respond to a request for comment.
The arrangement is still sure to raise questions given that he’s been placed at an office that makes legal decisions for the executive agency in charge of high-profile presidential efforts like the “anti-weaponization” fund. Trump’s attempts to get $10 billion out of the federal government with a personal lawsuit has morphed into a “settlement agreement” creating the fund. On Wednesday, 35 former federal judges made an independent attempt to reopen Trump’s original lawsuit against the IRS in an attempt to block the settlement.
Alito’s hire was not the first time the Trump administration has employed a Supreme Court justice’s family member. Trump made former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s son, Eugene Scalia, his labor secretary in 2019 — but that was three years after the death of the high court’s conservative stalwart. Long before that, President George W. Bush bypassed the Senate to appoint the younger Scalia in 2002 as the solicitor of labor while his father was still on the Supreme Court, an arrangement that The New York Times warned could require Scalia to recuse himself from cases given that the son would be involved in legal matters that would eventually be litigated in front of the nation’s highest court.
Until now, the last public reporting on Alito’s professional whereabouts was years ago, when he left the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher to become a staff attorney to Republicans on a Senate investigative subcommittee. However, NOTUS discovered that Alito later got hired by the federal government during the first Trump administration — as a career prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Court records list him as an attorney in 192 cases in that district. Alito’s earliest appearance seems to be in August 2019, when he started to work on an old case involving convicted cocaine dealers. He was listed as working in the district’s Alexandria office, where he was quickly assigned nearly a dozen cases over the next couple of months, mostly old ones in which he would oppose pleas for compassionate release from prison or identifying parole violations. A person at that office confirmed that Alito was a regular government employee there for years.
However, none of the six most recently closed cases feature any documentation showing Alito withdrawing as listed counsel, making it difficult to discern when he left that office. One of his final appearances in court as a prosecutor was at a sentencing hearing on April 1, 2025, for a man who was sent to prison for 13 years for dealing cocaine.
According to two sources, he showed up at the Treasury Department soon after that.